Article by
Barbados Today

Published on
November 8, 2016

MANILA – Jason Madarang, awaiting trial on a charge of drug use, is in a muggy, windowless cell in a Manila prison so overcrowded that inmates must sleep in halls and stairwells and share each toilet with 150 other men.

But with President Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs” raging beyond the walls of Quezon City Jail, Madarang says he is lucky.

“It’s safer here,” he said. “Outside, if the police want to shoot you, they shoot you, and then say you’re a drug pusher.”

Inmates sleep in the open at Quezon City Jail in Manila, Philippines.

The Philippines police say they have only shot drug suspects in legitimate operations.

Nearly 2,300 drug users and dealers have been killed in police operations or by suspected vigilantes since Duterte took office on June 30, according to the Philippines police.

Thousands more have been arrested, filling the country’s already seething jails to bursting point.

Quezon City Jail was built to hold 800 inmates but is now home to over 3,400 – far too many for its cell area, which is roughly equivalent to three basketball courts.

In mid-August, as Duterte’s anti-narcotics campaign intensified, the population briefly topped 4,000 until the jail insisted that detainees were sent elsewhere.

“If we hadn’t done that, we’d have 5,000 inmates by now,” said Lucila Abarca, the prison’s Community Relations Officer.

Two thirds of the inmates are inside on drug-related offences, according to data maintained by the prison.

Quezon City Jail is a teeming microcosm of a regional crisis driven by an explosion in use of methamphetamine, a highly addictive drug popular across Asia.

Prisons in countries such as Thailand and Myanmar are also chronically overcrowded, thanks largely to inmates on drug-related charges, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

But Philippine jails are Asia’s most congested, with an occupancy level of 316 percent, according to the Institute for Criminal Policy Research (ICPR) at Birkbeck, University of London.

Globally, the ICPR ranks the Philippines third in prison occupancy levels, behind only Haiti and Benin.

It was natural that the government’s “aggressive campaign against criminality and drugs” would boost the jail population, said Jesus Hinlo, Undersecretary for Public Safety at the Department of the Interior and Local Government, which is in charge of Quezon City Jail.

“The solution is…to build new and bigger jails,” he said, adding that a lack of funds made this a challenge.

Prison overcrowding poses “a very big challenge for us in terms of security and the health status of inmates,” said Abarca, the prison officer.

Inmates sleep poorly and easily fall sick, she said, and tensions always simmer over the cramped conditions. In July, there was a cholera outbreak caused by contaminated water.

Someone has chalked “WELCOME TO HELL” on the steps leading to Jason Madarang’s cellblock.

But the 29-year-old municipal worker, who said five people near his Manila home had been shot dead in recent months, wasn’t the only inmate who felt safer there.

His cellmate, Marconino Maximo, 39, said he was arrested a year ago and charged with possessing a pipe for smoking crystal methamphetamine, known in the Philippines as shabu.

“I’m lucky to be here because so many people have been killed,” he said.